Over half (55%) of UK IT professionals trust public cloud services less than they did two years ago, according to research conducted by hosting and cloud services company Leaseweb Global.
Transparency, customer service and ease of workload migration were all highlighted as potential concerns by the 500 UK-based IT professionals surveyed: 57% said they had found it challenging to migrate workloads out of a public cloud environment; 49% said they had encountered difficulties in understanding their cloud usage costs; and 49% had struggled to get hold of a public cloud provider’s customer services.
The research also calls into question the scale of the shift to the cloud over the last two years. When asked about the period from January 2019-December 2021, 36% of organisations described their approach to IT infrastructure as ‘cloud first’, with 19% stating their organisation was officially committed to a ‘cloud-only’ approach. Since January 2022, the proportion of respondents with a ‘cloud first’ approach has fallen to 31%, while those with a ‘cloud only’ approach has risen only to 25% of respondents.
When asked about the optimum IT infrastructure for their organisation, private cloud-only (23%) and a mixture of on-premise and public cloud (20%) were the most popular options. These were followed by public cloud-only (17%) and a mixture of on-premises and private cloud (14%), with on-premises-only the least popular option at 7%.
Two-thirds (66%) of respondents agree that the industry will see the end of on-premises infrastructure over the next two years.
Terry Storrar, Managing Director of Leaseweb UK, said: “Although respondents acknowledge that the desire and need to look after on-premises infrastructure is dying, the results also indicate that businesses are still using it as an ongoing component of their IT infrastructure when adopting hybrid cloud. The key takeaway from this research is IT teams are looking for flexibility – there’s no one size fits all approach.”
